For many months, the small border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, has been the scene of a bitter legal battle between Gov. Greg Abbott and President Joe Biden’s administration over how best to handle the record number of arriving migrants. to the border. The court fights, which intensified last week, have centered on claims that the border is in crisis.
But recently, the opposite has been happening along the Rio Grande as it flows through Eagle Pass: In an area that last year was the epicenter of unauthorized migration along the southern border, far fewer migrants have been crossing. .
Abbott has cited this decline as evidence that his aggressive attempt to expand the boundaries of immigration law and his $10 billion program to harden the state’s border with Mexico — using National Guard troops, razor wire, helicopters , boats and floating buoys on the Rio Grande—has been working.
“The cartels have rerouted their routes to cross the border because Texas is the only state that is mounting resistance,” Abbott said during a news conference in Eagle Pass last month, flanked by more than a dozen Republican governors.
If the federal government did what Texas is doing, Abbott added, “we would eliminate illegal immigration overnight.”
However, determining what dynamics have influenced the changing border numbers remains a matter of debate.
Federal officials have said changes in the Mexican government’s handling of migrants were responsible for a sharp drop in arrivals along the border after record levels in December. Immigration experts said crossings typically decline in the colder months only to increase again during the spring.
But what is clear is that fewer people have arrived through Texas.
The latest publicly available federal data on border encounters, released Friday, has shown a measurable shift westward in recent months, away from Texas — which accounts for 2,018 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile southern border — and toward to New Mexico, Arizona and California.
In February, Border Patrol agents recorded about 87,000 encounters with migrants in California and Arizona, compared to 53,000 in Texas. Last year, the numbers were essentially the other way around: Nearly 55,000 encounters took place outside of Texas versus 76,000 recorded in the state. (Overall, the number of crossings was slightly higher last month.)
“There are a few reasons, and Texas policies are one of them,” said Adam Isacson, who focuses on borders and migration at the Washington Office on Latin America. He said that, more than anything else, it seemed to be fear of the uncertain legal landscape – particularly the looming Texas migrant arrest law known as Senate Bill 4 (SB4), which passed in December. which has caused many migrants to avoid the state.
“People don’t care about buoys or barbed wire,” he added. “The fear of the unknown with SB4 is leading people to decide to avoid Texas.”
The law was suspended last week by a federal appeals court amid a challenge to its constitutionality by the Biden administration. The postponement has persuaded at least some migrants to try to cross before it takes effect.
Richi Silva, a 32-year-old Venezuelan who secured an immigration appointment with federal agents in Brownsville, Texas, said he had seen hundreds of migrants on the other side of the border, waiting to cross.
Still, the westward movement of migrants has been evident in one of Abbott’s most politically successful border initiatives: his program to bus migrants to Democratic cities like New York, Chicago and Denver.
Since January, the number of buses has decreased dramatically. Nearly all buses now travel from El Paso, where a large federal processing center handles migrants crossing into New Mexico as well as Texas. Very few leave former migration hotspots in Texas, such as McAllen, Eagle Pass and Brownsville.
“They are being detained in New Mexico and are just being processed in El Paso,” said Chris Olivarez, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. “Not much has really happened here.”
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for details about the federal detentions.
Migration patterns often change as smugglers look for the easiest places to cross amid a patchwork of checkpoints along the border.
Additionally, the overall decline in crossings between December and January coincided with changes in Mexico’s handling and deportation of migrants in those months, a factor cited by U.S. authorities.
“We’ve gotten very, very few,” said Valeria Wheeler, executive director of Mission: Border Hope in Eagle Pass, as she walked through the nonprofit’s cavernous new shelter in the center of town. The location, opened in the fall, resembles the terminal of a medium-sized airport. Rows upon rows of metal chairs sat empty during a visit one day last week. There were only three migrants in the shelter. On any given day in December, there would have been between 800 and 1,200, Wheeler said.
“It’s a cycle,” he added. “We are prepared for when more come.”
At a migrant shelter in the Mexican town of Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, Israel Rodríguez, a pastor who runs the shelter, said he had noticed a sharp decline shortly after the U.S. Secretary of State United States, Antony Blinken, and other senior US officials, traveled to Mexico in December asking for that country’s intervention.
“They are stopping them before they get to us,” Rodriguez said of the Mexican officials. Officials then take the migrants deeper into Mexico, he said. “They are dropped off in the center of the country and the migrants begin the journey back to the border, this time avoiding the checkpoints.”
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